It's a bit of a demanding read--Dunmore leaps across time and space, her narrative mirroring the way people think, but as a result, you are immersed completely. If a child was born from those two people, I wonder if it would be born knowing all their secrets, somewhere within it. Her writing is so powerful and evocative it enables her to depict the dark events in this novel as something beautiful and real.

On one hand I liked the way the novel is insightful: Catherine’s state of mind when she finds out that the world is changing, the minute descriptions of all the characters and the little twists and turns in the narrative. I know the author is under no obligation to give her readers a happy ending, and I'm not sure how it could have happened in this case, but the story's resolution was just so disappointing and unsatisfying. But as the First World War draws closer, crimes both big and small threaten the delicate refuge they have built. I also thought the book’s ending chapter somewhat anticlimactic; the final scenes depict the first time Cathy is able to make reasonably informed decisions in her own interest, and seeing convictions from her younger years overturned is a victory in itself, but I found the ease with which she makes those choices and the apparent lack of conflict in following them through rather bizarre.Like those books, this is about observations and relationships and development and the impact of trauma. The house and characters are both occupied by dark secrets and watching the evolution/aftermath which is derived from them makes for compulsive reading. I enjoyed reading this a lot and this probably doesn't say as much as it should - even though I read a lot, there's very few books that can make me settle down with one for hours, or make me think about it when I'm not reading it.

Kate, the young woman who attends to both children and the house’s upkeep (among other household staff), is dedicated to her duties but longs for a life of her own in which she’s entitled to more than a leaking attic bedroom. There were parts earlier in the book when I felt that it was really too long, and the incest and abortion in the middle was squicky, and also quite an odd reading experience given that I'd inadvertently bagged two reads in a month featuring sibling incest - what? Some events in the plot were gripping and shocking but the parts in-between were quite slow and boring. Voor mij 5 sterren omdat dit boek niet onder 1 noemer te vatten valt, omdat de taal zo mooi en verzorgd is, omdat de schrijfster mij soms ongemakkelijk deed heen en weer schuiven in mijn zetel, omdat ik het moeilijk kon opzij leggen. I willed the snow to lie for ever, and I turned over and buried my head under the pillow so as not to hear the chuckle and drip of thaw….

But when that relationship begins to break down, Catherine alone must reconstruct the fragments of her life. The maturity of Catherine, even though she lives in a world with limited experiences, is amazing and is possible because she accepts what is and keeps an even appearance to the outside world.

Against this strange and secretive backdrop, Cathy and Rob develop a closeness so fierce that it eventually threatens to smother them both. Dunmore’s writing is both flowing and haunting, easy to read but also determined to crawl under the reader’s skin.

Since I’ve now done both this week (apologies to my baffled friend who had to sit through the strange explanations), I’m ready to cast off this hallucinatory novel and remember it fondly as one of the odd little black sheep who sometimes wander onto my bookshelves with no discernible origin. To prevent Miss Gallagher finding out, Cathy leads her deep into the nearby woods, ostensibly to show her some wild flowers. Though the house has a dominating presence, many of the book’s key moments – instances of sex, violence, conflict, and death – all take place in the surrounding wildlands. She published twelve novels including Zennor in Darkness , which won the McKitterick Prize; Burning Bright; A Spell of Winter, which won the inaugural Orange Prize in 1996; Talking to the Dead; Your Blue-Eyed Boy; With Your Crooked Heart; The Siege, which was shortlisted for the 2001 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction 2002; Mourning Ruby and House of Orphans. To some degree, this might be down to no more than a pacing issue, but it led to a lot of confusion on my part of what this book was aiming to do.

Cathy, knowing she will not find her way back home on her own, frightens her with ghost stories, then abandons her. Though the entire book was a very quick and engrossing read for me, there’s a definite shift in the last third or so of the novel when the war finally comes into play that made the structure of the book start to fall apart for me. I was planning to read My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier mid-November, but if you want to do a buddy read in the new year, I can put it off. The synopsis on the cover (and on Goodreads) offers little in the way of what to expect, and I can see where not knowing what you’re getting into here could lead to less than favorable experiences for some readers, though the right audience will find this a gorgeous (if grim) book.

A less experienced author may have turned this into a "romantic melodrama", but Delbanco stated that Dunmore's "authoritative telling" has produced a "haunt[ing]" tale. Alone in their grandfather's decaying country house, they roam the wild grounds freely with minds attuned to the rural wilderness. I began by listening to and learning by heart all kinds of rhymes and hymns and ballads, and then went on to make up my own poems, using the forms I’d heard. My seventh novel, The Siege (2001) was shortlisted both for the Whitbread Novel Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction.